1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to methods for analyzing, categorizing, and searching information and the processing thereof, and, more particularly, relates to methods for analyzing and identifying a search inquiry in free format and in any language and retrieving information pertinent thereto.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the information society of today, a large amount of information is received and processed either on a human level or at a computer level. At the computer level, information of all types comes in various different formats and presentations which always requires certain amount of interpretation by the human reader before it is understood by the same. This is a relatively intuitive process at the human level. However, in providing information to a computer device, the information has to be a certain type and has to be provided in a certain format before it can be properly recognized and categorized by the computer device along with its software applications. Otherwise, the information will be refused by the corresponding software application. For example, in conducting a search for certain information content from an information source such as the internet or a database, information is generally searched and found by the matching of one or more keywords in a designated language where each and every reference containing the given keywords are retrieved and provided to the user. This approach is a brute force approach where the search is conducted by the simple matching of keywords with references without any additional preprocessing. Optionally, given keywords can be accompanied by flags indicating the type of keywords and the search scope. Here, a particular type of information in a specific format is provided to the computer device to limit the search scope. Thus, in one case, a search inquiry in a particular language is provided in a free format where references are retrieved indiscriminately. In the second case, a search inquiry in a particular language is provided in a specific (and required) format to narrow the search results. In either case, there is no intelligent analysis of the search inquiry by the computer device and the user is required to provide an intelligent search inquiry in a designated language and format.
It would be desirable to allow the user to input a search inquiry unrestricted as to format as well as language where the search inquiry is processed in an intelligent manner to facilitate the searching and retrieving of information most likely to be desired by the user.